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Become A Startup Insider With Inc42 Plus
Join our exclusive community of business leaders &makers for in-depth tech stories and intelligence on India’s tech economy you won’t find elsewhere.
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Become A Startup Insider
Become a Startup Insider in 2024 with Inc42 Plus. Join our exclusive community of 10,000+ founders, investors & operators and stay ahead in India’s startup & business economy.
While Indian businesses have been grappling with the losses and the downturn brought on by the pandemic, among the few sectors that witnessed growth even amid the crisis is the fintech sector. An Inc42 Plus analysis revealed that fintech startup funding grew by 17% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) in Q2 FY2020. The total funding scored by the sector between the 2014 and H1 2020 by fintech startups in the country stood at $10 Bn across 692 deals.
Thanks to its solutions that have provided the SMB sector ease of lending as well as payments, especially amidst the pandemic, fintech startups are responsible for much of Indian SMBs’ growth and scale. Even then, there still lies a lot of untapped potential for the sector from this market.
To decode these opportunities for the segment as well as the challenges, trends and more, to help startups cater to the ‘Next Billion’ users in India, Inc42 in association with tech giant Microsoft launched ‘The Dialogue’, focussing on agritech, healthtech, fintech and horizontal SaaS.
The second episode in this four-part series, ‘Fintech For India’s Next Billion: Empowering Digital Transformation Of India’s SMBs’, brought together a panel of stalwarts and experts, debating on the potential of the Indian market as well as the opportunities and challenges in reaching the underserved audience.
The Dialogue: Fintech For India’s Next Billion
Moderated by Inc42 cofounder and CEO Vaibhav Vardhan, the discussion brought together fintech startup Karza cofounder and CBO Gaurav Samdaria, 3one4 Capital founding partner Siddharth Pai, Vijayant Rai, country head for BFSI sector at Microsoft India and Deena Jacob, cofounder and CFO of neobanking startup Open.
The discussion elaborated on and provided insight into various aspects such as:
- Role of fintech in empowering Indian SMBs
- The impact of the new FDI norms that mandate government approval for funding from land-border nations such as China
- The challenges of working with large public sector banks as well as the legacy credit bureau
- The rise of neobanking startups and digital-first strategies to onboard the next billion users and more
